Haydn is the last major composer whose music was regularly discussed by his contemporaries in terms derived from the classical tradition of rhetoric. Within a generation of his death, that discourse had fallen from favor, but the historical relationship between Haydn and the rhetorical tradition endured.

In this volume, a distinguished group of contributors in fields from classics to literature to musicology restores the rhetorical model to prominence and shows what can be achieved by returning to the idea of music as a rhetorical process. An accompanying DVD, specially designed for this project, presents performances and illustrations keyed to its chapters, making musicological arguments accessible to nonspecialists and advancing additional arguments of its own through the medium of performance. The volume thus reaches beyond musicology to enrich and complicate the larger debate over rhetoric’s role in eighteenth-century culture.

"The distinguished contributors to this book (and DVD) take the time-honored subject of rhetoric and music and look at it afresh, mainly through the solo and chamber music (including songs) of Joseph Haydn. Not limited to discussions of Haydn’s use of rhetorical devices in composing, the volume considers, for example, the role of performer as orator, rhetorical interrelationships among groups of works, and how the decline of rhetorical thinking and listening in the early 19th century transformed the relationship between composer and audience. There is even voiced a mildly dissenting perspective. In short, this is a lively, stimulating book that has something to say to both scholars and performers."

Thomas O. Sloane, University of California, Berkeley

"This book successfully applies rhetoric not simply in its formalist modes of arrangement and style but in its more collaborative and critically difficult modes of invention and delivery. Listening to Haydn within a rhetorical framework revivifies the rhetorical tradition, within which the composer becomes an orator and music becomes discourse."

Tom Tolley, University of Edinburgh

“A tremendous and substantial contribution to Haydn scholarship, this book introduces, explains, and expands on a theme—rhetoric in music—that is likely to be vaguely familiar to readers, but which has never previously been treated in such an expansive, informative, and coherent fashion. Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric points the way forward for new musicological research on the eighteenth century.”

Choice

"In this groundbreaking collection of essays . . . the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. [The editors] have fashioned a coherent narrative that not only reveals how the classical rhetorical tradition undergirds the composition, performance, and reception of music written between 1600 and 1800 but also stands as an excellent introduction to rhetoric per se. . . . This book has the power to change the way the music of Haydn and his contemporaries is heard and performed."

Janet K. Page | Austrian History Yearbook

"The essays are all intriguing, especially in the way they speak to each other throughout the volume. . . . Although aimed primarily at musicologists . . . the book also offers an interesting perspective on late-eighteenth-century culture that will interest other readers as well."

Nancy November | Eighteenth-Century Music

"This is a book that has opened up the discussion of Haydn and rhetoric so widely—but never too widely, thanks to considered argumentation and careful analysis—that the conversation simply must continue."